


The Museum of Witchcraft & Magic

by Thehorrorthehorror



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Artists, Author Is Sleep Deprived, Bad Pick-Up Lines, Falling In Love, First Time, Flirting, Fluff, Folktales, Getting Together, Goth Jon Snow, M/M, Magic, Making Out, Manic pixie dream Tormund, References to Depression, Tattoos, Very brief mention of minor character death (it's Sandor)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-12 05:33:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28630341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thehorrorthehorror/pseuds/Thehorrorthehorror
Summary: Stuck in a rut, Jon Snow quits his job as a painting professor and leaves London to tour the UK on his motorcycle, stopping in Somerset to visit Ygritte, his ex-lover and bandmate, at an artist's colony where she's writing a folk album with his friends Edd and Grenn. Eager to focus on his own art, he's planned to stay indefinitely, but he hasn't planned on meeting Tormund Giantsbane.
Relationships: Tormund Giantsbane/Jon Snow
Comments: 11
Kudos: 30





	The Museum of Witchcraft & Magic

**Author's Note:**

> Very closely based on my own experiences (except for that last part.)

Grit whipped Jon’s face and bits of gravel bounced off his helmet as he leaned into the corner, his Goldwing threatening to fishtail. He was pushing the old bike harder than he should be, riding too fast on the narrow country lane, his headlight illuminating only the few feet of asphalt directly ahead of him, leaving the hedgerows to his left and right in total darkness. After four hours of riding, his lower back ached, and his arms felt like jelly.

His stepfather would have teased him for it. When Ned was alive, they’d toured Europe and Northern Asia with his half-sister Arya, riding for eight or ten hours at a time. Some of his fondest memories were of riding through Czesky Krumlov on the Vltava river, a Czech town dominated by a 13th century Gothic castle. These days, he rarely left London. A lecturer in the painting department at Goldsmith’s College, he found that although he had long breaks between semesters, they were typically eaten up with class-planning and exhibition deadlines and occasional weeks-long bouts of debilitating depression, and so his bike had been sitting neglected in his sister Sansa’s garage in Shoreditch.

Of all his siblings, Sansa was the only one who seemed to be able to stay in any one place or hold a salaried job, and so her house and garage had become a repository for his boxes of art monographs and crates full of rare punk records and bin bags overflowing with band t-shirts with stained armpits but too much sentimental value to toss out.

Jon wasn’t sure what he’d do now that he quit his job, but he knew he couldn’t go on as he had been. He’d fallen into teaching when a friend left and recommended him for the position, but he hated maintaining classroom discipline. It took all of his courage to present himself as any kind of an authority figure, and most days, the effort left him feeling tired and fragile.

As a 32-year-old man, feeding and showering himself often felt like insurmountable obstacles. The chaotic emotional lives of his 20-something students threatened at every turn to disrupt his own hard-won equilibrium. If he couldn’t support himself on painting alone, better to go back to bartending or dog-walking.

Many of the students were wealthy, and treated their professors with the same sense of entitlement that they’d use to address a cashier at Sainsbury’s. Even on his days off, Jon often felt too burnt out to work on his own paintings. The last straw had been the death of his friend Sandor. He’d lost too many friends this year, and he worried for his own mental health if he stayed in the city.

It was better this way. The not knowing. It had to be better. He’d given the administrative assistant of his department plenty of fair warning that he wouldn’t be sticking around for the Fall semester, not wanting to burn his bridges entirely, and on the last day of his Spring classes, when the last student’s work had been critiqued-a series of absolutely forgettable organic abstractions purported to take inspiration from Spinoza’s writings on virtue and happiness, Jon took the Line 35 bus to Shoreditch, whipped the tarp off of his bike and started out for Somerset, where he planned to visit his former bandmates Edd, Grenn, and Ygritte, who were writing a new album in an off-grid artist’s community called FreeForm.

Although he’d slept around a fair amount in his twenties, with people of all genders, Ygritte had been his most serious relationship by far. They’d been friends first, then bandmates, and dated on and off for four years. Their final breakup had been ugly, acrimonious, and abrupt, ending the band and leaving Jon in the middle of an awkward standoff between their bandmates. They’d eventually reconciled, but Jon still got butterflies when he saw her, still wondered if she found him attractive, still wondered how his life might be different if he hadn’t had a panic attack about his first solo exhibition a week before their first European tour and begged to cancel, almost leaving his bandmates out hundreds of pounds on merch and travel expenses.

It was one of his lowest moments and although he’d recovered and gone through with the trip, their trust had been broken. Music had always taken a backseat to his own art practice, but to his friends, the band had been everything. It had taken years for them to fully reconcile, but it was important to Jon and he was grateful for the present opportunity to renew their friendship.

After several wrong turns down what turned out to be farmer’s lanes, Jon found the wooden sign that Ygritte had described, a plywood pig spray painted lime green. Dogs barked frantically. Jon killed his engine, knowing there were likely chickens pecking about, and walked his bike down the wooded path to the collection of tents, tiny houses, wattle-and daub huts and A-frames he knew from photographs but had never visited.

Jon parked the bike next to what looked like an outhouse. A lithe red-haired woman in cuffed jeans and an oversized men’s denim button-down ran down the dark path to greet him and threw herself into his arms.

“Ygritte. It’s good to see you.”

“Took you long enough, fucker.”

“I stopped in Bocastle.”

“That’s an hour out of the way.”

“Museum of Witchcraft & Magic?”

A man’s voice cut in, unfamiliar, with an accent that was hard to place. Scandinavian, maybe, but with a hint of South London. Jon hadn’t noticed him before, he’d been so focused on Ygritte. The man stepped out of the shadows and onto the path. He was nearly six and a half feet tall, with a red beard, red hair almost down to his waist and a vintage Venom T-shirt with a giant hole in it through which peeked copius amounts of red chest hair and a pierced nipple.

“How’d you know?’ asked Jon.

“You look like a witch.”

“This is Tormund” said Ygritte. “He’s here from London for a film residency.”

“And this is the ex you’ve been talking about.” Tormund stared unapologetically.

“I would believe in magick, if I believed in anything” said Jon.

“You think when we die, there’s nothing?”

“I know it.”

“Well in that case we’d better get fucking drunk.”

Tormund howled, and a couple of Alaskan Malamutes bounded up to him, circling frantically. Tormund dropped the ground and wrestled the dogs, who yelped with excitement and enthusiastically mauled him. The larger one started humping his leg, and Ygritte screamed with laughter.

“She’s dominating you!” yelled Ygritte.

“I submit!” yelled Tormund. “I submit to all powerful women.”

“Lady! Off!” Ygritte grabbed the large dog by the collar and pulled her off of Turmund, who shook with laughter in the dirt. Jon shivered. He wondered if there was anything between the two of them, although last he’s heard she’d been dating Edd.

“Come on, let’s get you to the fire” said Tormund, throwing a massive arm around his shoulder and squeezing.

“Aren’t you cold too?”

“Don’t you see my hair? I’ve been kissed by fire!”

Jon grinned. In another context, he might have found Tormund’s exuberance off-putting, but not here, in the woods, in this new phase of life.

The trio walked down the path, past an assembly of long, low buildings that housed FreeForm’s kitchens, Ygritte shining a light ahead of them.

“Was that a fucking peacock?”

“What’s that about cock?”

“Tormund, for fuck’s sake” said Ygritte. “It’s a peahen but the cock’s around here somewhere.”

“That’s for sure” said Tormund, smirking.

When he saw his friends approaching, Edd got up from the log on which he was sitting, strumming a guitar, and ran to Jon, enfolding him in a bear hug. The fire cracked and shot sparks into the air. There were other people around the fire, talking and drinking, mostly about his age, Jon guessed, but a few older people and one couple with children, who excused themselves and headed for their camper shortly after introductions. Jon immediately forgot their names. He was awkward in social situations and his first instinct was to turn inwards. A bottle of whiskey went around the group. Edd picked up his guitar and began to play, while Ygritte sang a song about a couple who were led off their path on the moor by pixies, in a voice so haunting that Jon felt tears welling up in his eyes. Even Tormund, whose energy seemed unquenchable, watched her in quiet reverence.

“have you ever hear of Fitz’s Well?” asked Ygritte, when she’d finished singing.

“It’s a real place on Okehampton, you can still see it, even though it’s caved in quite a bit. The legend is that a couple was on their way home from a night of dancing when some pixies led them off the path with strange lights and took them around and around in circles until they were exhausted and couldn’t walk any further. They knew if they could find a spring of clear water and drink some of it the spell would be broken. Finally they came to a spring, and when they drank from it, sure enough, the pixies vanished. The man was so grateful that he had a mason erect a stone cross by the well. The place got a reputation for magic and people in the village believed if you visited on Easter morning, you could look into the well and see your destiny.”

“Well it’s two am and I’m drunk. My destiny is to get some sleep” said Jon. “I’m going to set up my tent.”

“If you’d got here when you were supposed to, you wouldn’t have to set up in the pitch dark.”

“Don’t bother” said Tormund. My tent’s big enough for two. Bunk with me and you can set up properly in the morning.”

“I won’t argue with that. Thank you” said Jon.

“But first, skinny dipping” announced Tormund.

“No way” said Ygritte. “Jon, I’ll come get you in the morning for breakfast. Watch out for this one. Don’t let him keep you up all night.”

Tormund led Jon to a large tent in an oak grove.

“Leave your backpack here so it doesn’t get wet.”

“You’re not actually going swimming?” said Jon.

“It’s Springtime, I spend my whole miserable life in London where there’s no fucking ponds or trees or stars, so fuck yes I’m going swimming, little witch. When was the last time your naked ass touched a natural body of water?”

“Alright let’s go.”

Jon was seized with a burst of manic energy. He followed Tormund into the woods, the dogs crashing through the underbrush at their sides. Brambles scraped his arms and face, and nettles stung his ankles. The light from Tormund’s flashlight bounced haphazardly off the ground and the surrounding forest, making Jon dizzy. When they arrived at the edge of the pond, Tormund set down the flashlight and shucked off his clothes. It was too dark to decipher them fully in the low light, but Jon could see that Tormund was heavily tattooed in complex knots of druidic, astrological and alchemical symbols. Emboldened, Jon shucked off his own clothing, and the two men stood naked, observing each other.

“See, it feels good to be naked under the stars.”

“Skyclad. isn’t that what the pagans call it,?” said Jon, grinning. He took a running jump and splashed into the shallow pond, the dogs and Tormund following close at his heels.

“Oh! It’s fucking freezing. And slimy. Tormund, it stinks. It’s fucking foul. It’s nothing but mud and algae. And the dogs. Oh my god, the dogs are going to be filthy!

Tormund cackled hysterically. He paddled into Jon’s space.

“There’s a hose back at the camp. Water gets nice and warm. If you’d like, we can hose each other down.”

Jon, who’d been politely ignoring Tormund’s innuendoes all evening, decided to call his bluff and paddled into the gap between them, stopping to stand on a particularly slimy rock.

“I would like that.”

“Would you now?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“That’s good” said Tormund, reaching out to brush a lock of muddy hair out of Jon’s face. Jon felt his cock hardening at their proximity. “Because I don’t want no dirty little witch in my tent.”

Tormund leaned forward, taking his lips in a hungry kiss. Jon stepped on his tiptoes to wrap his arms around the taller man’s neck, pulling him closer, deepening the kiss. Tormund whined, then pulled away.

“Tormund?” whispered Jon.

“I need your enthusiastic consent” said Tormund.

“What exactly am I consenting to?” asked Jon, grinning.

“To going back to my tent, letting me worship your body while I open you up slowly on my fingers and tongue, then letting me absolutely destroy you with my giant Norwegian cock.”

Jon reached out to palm Tormund.

“You’re not joking.”

“I never joke about things that are truly important.”

“You have my consent” whispered Jon.

Tormund wrapped him in his arms and took his mouth in a filthy kiss, then held him out at arm’s length to examine him under the moonlight.

“Gods, you’re so beautiful. Some time I’d like to film you”

Jon whimpered. He was feral with lust.

“Get me back to the camp. Right bloody now. There’s no fucking way I’m finding my way back on my own.”

As if on cue, the flashlight on the pond’s bank dimmed, then expired, leaving the men in total darkness.

“Fucking hell. Now what do we do? If we yell we’ll wake up the whole camp.”

“You’re not the only one around here with powers, little witch.”

“Tormund, what the fuck are you talking about?” Jon felt the adrenaline leave him in a rush. Suddenly he was bone tired, and frustrated with himself. Was this man crazy? Jon had always been attracted to people like him- unconventional, magnetic, unstable.

It was too dark to make out much, but Jon could see that Tormund was motioning deliberately with his hands, first in the pitch blackness but then, very gradually, he seemed to be holding a dim ball of blue light. As he motioned, he chanted a low litany of words in a guttural language, and the light increased in brightness, bathing his wild hair and beard in an electric glow. Tormund held out his hand, and the brilliant orb floated out ahead of the two men, radiant and warming. Jon stared, overcome by the beauty of it, blood rushing in his ears. He would follow Tormund anywhere.


End file.
